Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Meta’s child endangerment trial kicks off
The state of New Mexico’s jury trial against Meta over allegations that its executives knowingly enabled child predation on the company’s apps kicked off Monday.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has called Meta the “largest marketplace for predators and pedophiles globally,” and said the platform’s algorithm helps fuel social media addiction among kids. In a statement to The Guardian, a Meta spokesperson rebuked Torrez for making “sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments by cherrypicking select documents,” and said Meta is “focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”
Sacha Haworth, an advocate for Big Tech regulation who leads the Tech Oversight Project, told The Guardian that such attempts to hold social media companies accountable are the “trials of a generation” and said they could mirror how courts reined in Big Tobacco and Big Pharma.
Read more at The Guardian.
Loomer loses in court
Laura Loomer’s latest attempt to get out of paying the remainder of a settlement she reached with the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been shot down by a federal judge. The settlement stems from a failed lawsuit the far-right activist filed alleging that CAIR had a hand in getting her banned from Twitter.
Read more at CAIR’s website.
Right-wing Christians pray for Trump and ICE
Right Wing Watch published an article on the trend of Christian nationalists and other conservative religious activists rushing to defend the Trump administration after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Read more at Right Wing Watch.
Patriot mobile executive takes a tumble
Leigh Wambsganss, the chief communications officer of conservative, Christian cell phone company Patriot Mobile, came out as the loser in a Texas state Senate race last Saturday that saw the Democratic candidate, Taylor Rehmet, handily win a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024.
Check out this MS NOW segment at YouTube.
X raided
French prosecutors raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media company, X, as part of their probe of artificial intelligence deepfakes generated on the platform that included nonconsensual pornography and imagery showing child sexual abuse.
Read more from my colleague Sydney Carruth at MS NOW. My colleague Steve Benen published a great write-up highlighting the disturbing details in a report by The Wall Street Journal on a previously undisclosed multimillion-dollar stake that officials from the United Arab Emirates purchased in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm — four days before Trump’s inauguration. One of the officials involved in the deal is a man known as the “spy sheikh.” Read more at MS NOW. There were a lot of fascinating revelations in the latest dump of Epstein files from the Justice Department — and some of the most interesting ones involved Epstein’s ties to Big Tech. I wrote about how they reveal Epstein’s ties to prominent white supremacists, including his financial support for a popular alt-right YouTuber and his promotion of a popular white nationalist podcast. Read more at MS NOW. Politico reports that Donald Trump’s plan to create a high-tech “Golden Dome” is struggling to take shape, in part because of the project’s complexity. Read more at Politico.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
Trump’s chip deals
Racism in the Epstein files
Golden Dome’s doldrums
